


On absolution

by ursahelianthus



Category: Timeless (TV 2016)
Genre: Angst, F/M, Lincoln - ouch., Pre-Relationship, Self-Loathing, a flash drive, a secret, partners
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-11-02
Updated: 2018-11-02
Packaged: 2019-08-14 14:11:43
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,506
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16494119
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ursahelianthus/pseuds/ursahelianthus
Summary: “Do you know why I forgave you?” A challenge.“I don’t want your forgiveness,” he bites back. A lie.





	On absolution

It’s taken Lucy months of cajoling, reasoning, guilt-tripping, and straight-up demanding, but she’s finally obtained all the authorizations, and the whole team is on board. They’re going to run Flynn’s mission, the one his arrest interrupted, and try to save his family. 

Arranging everything behind his back wasn’t easy, what with Flynn being Flynn and all of them living within ten feet of each other, but she had to be sure no one would back out and that every detail was triple-checked before she told him. It had been a longer process than she’d anticipated to find out who ordered, greenlit, and carried out the attack on his family. Two weeks of going through her grandfather Ethan’s records again since things might have changed after all the jumps they’d done, and another month of waiting while Denise did off-books interrogations with the Rittenhouse members they had in lockup. The past few weeks Lucy has spent more and more time alone in her room doing research on the list of people Denise had handed her. 

Horrifyingly but not surprisingly, it was Benjamin Cahill who had sanctioned the hit at the highest level. Just plain horrifyingly, a squad of no less than eight ex-military operatives had been sent to kill the Flynns in their sleep. Lucy almost threw up when she first opened the document and saw how many names there were. 

Rittenhouse or not, she finds it disturbingly invasive to trawl through the minutiae of these operatives’ lives using Connor’s powerful and incredibly illegal database search software. Each query brings up page after page of classified files, family photos, receipts, text messages, GPS traces, bank records, even psychotherapy notes and grade school homework. Lucy saves it all to a government-issue flash drive, a small black device that looks exactly like the one she handed Flynn right before the SWAT team descended on them. She knows it wasn’t her fault, but that doesn’t mean the betrayal wasn’t real. 

She compiles and collates the most important data, fervently hoping that her own team will think of a viable strategy that involves rescuing Lorena and Iris without preemptively eliminating all eight Rittenhouse operatives and the entire chain of command. She tries not to think about phrases like mutually assured destruction and premeditated murder. Right now all she has is information. What they do with it will be up to Flynn. 

The team will have to unanimously approve the final plan, but everyone agreed follow Flynn’s lead on this one, and Lucy recognized it for the gift it was: a mark of trust in Flynn’s ability to make the right calls; a sign of if not full pardon, then at least of respect for the fact that he has earned his place and their loyalty. Garcia Flynn would have a shot at saving his family, and all of their help in doing it. 

Given that they usually spend their off hours together, Flynn definitely notices Lucy disappearing for hours at a stretch, but he doesn’t call her out on it. She knows he’s not worried. She knows he can sense her purposefulness, that she’s working on something big. But he doesn’t press her, and she’s grateful that he gives her space by default instead of her having to turn him away. Their partnership is one of absolute honesty, but they both know the only way it works is if they’re allowed their privacy and their secrets as well.

If Flynn had asked outright, she would have hold him, but she hadn’t wanted to bring any of it to him before every part was confirmed. Dangling false hope at this point would be unimaginably cruel. Even now she’s not sure how he’ll react. Today’s the day – all her ducks are finally in a row. 

The team has just returned from a terrible mission trying to preserve Andrew Johnson’s first term, and Flynn could barely look at Lucy with the echoes of the Lincoln assassination all around them, but the search that she left running in the present has turned up the last piece of information she needed, and she doesn’t want to wait any longer. She doesn’t want _him_ to have to wait any longer. He’ll probably want to independently verify her intel before moving on it, but if Lucy’s impatient after just a few months of planning, she can’t imagine how Flynn must feel. It’s been five years almost to the day since his family was killed. 

Lucy’s all eager nerves and cautious hope when she opens his door and walks right in, knocking on the frame more out of habit than to ask permission. She stops short when she sees Flynn standing with his back to the door, tension in every line of his body, still wearing his muddy clothes from 1866. There’s bright red blood on the clenched knuckles of his right fist, and two dents in the metal filing cabinet that weren’t there before.

“Flynn?”

It worries her. He might be positively destructive when unleashed on the world, might get scraped and wounded out in the field, but he's not one to inflict injury on himself. Even in the depths of despair and self-loathing, he hasn’t ever compromised his ability to fight or to protect the team. He’ll be pissed in the morning when his shooting hand is still swollen. 

“Flynn, you’re hurt.”

He flexes his hand but doesn’t turn around. “Lucy, whatever it is, not now.” His voice comes out harsh and uneven, pronunciation stilted as he struggles to master himself. 

Oh. The last time she heard him like that was in a basement rigged with explosives. 

She takes a step forward and he tenses further, draws his shoulders in. “Is this about Lincoln?” she says. “Because Garcia, that’s in the past. We’re past it.”

“Lucy, just go!”

“No. You’ve more than made up-”

“ _Lucy_.”

“ _No_. I know you, Flynn. You’re beating yourself up over, what, everything? Judging by the way you won’t even look at me? All the blood on your hands — is that it?”

Silence. 

“Well stop it. You’re not that person anymore. You’re ours now. You deserve to be here.”

He gives a scornful laugh. “How can you say that after everything I’ve done?”

Fine. “Do you know why I forgave you?” A challenge. 

“I don’t want your forgiveness,” he bites back. A lie. 

“It’s because I came to see us as equals.” That makes him look up, so she continues more calmly, leaving just a hint of steel in her measured tone. “In the beginning, I didn’t understand how you could do what you did. Killing and changing history and making people disappear. I thought I was morally superior, saw myself as a victim – of you, Rittenhouse, time.” She trails off. He hasn’t turned to face her, but the silence between them has become focused, the stillness attentive. “Now I know I’m capable of the same offenses. I’m not condoning them. I just could easily be in your position.”

Flynn scoffs. “Lucy, you haven’t done a tenth of the harm I’ve done. And you never would have shot Abraham Lincoln.”

She doesn’t rise to the provocation. Just waits for him to work through what she’s said.

He lets out an aggravated growl, rounding sharply on her and moving into her space. “What, so you’ve been dragged down to my level. Neither of us should be judged for being killers?” He looms over her. Using his height is an intimidation tactic that has not once worked before, but all of his bad habits seem to be coming back today.

Lucy shakes her head, stands her ground. “No, Flynn. Neither of us are perfect. Judgement requires setting myself above you, but I’m not fundamentally better than you. Both of us are human — prone to wrongdoing, and deserving of anger for it.”

“So be angry at me!” he nearly shouts. Pleads. “You didn’t deserve what I did to you.”

“I _am_ angry. I _am_ hurt.” Lucy is emphatic but she doesn’t raise her voice. “I didn’t forgive you because I lack self-respect or I think I haven’t been deeply, painfully wronged. I didn’t forgive you because I got over the loss of my sister. I did it because I’m not interested in resentment or retribution, especially not out of some hypocritical sense of justice!” She’s inches away from his face now, meeting his suspicious scowl with a fierce glare of her own. Only Flynn could argue so vehemently against his own forgiveness.

Lucy steps back. Smooths her expression and holds up the flash drive in the small space between them. “Garcia, I forgave you because anger doesn’t preclude compassion, and I think you deserve both.”

Flynn stares at her and then the flash drive, grasping the implications immediately, but he doesn’t reach out for it. He looks back to Lucy, disbelief and guilt flaring in his features. She meets his gaze, steady and sure. 

“I lied to you earlier,” he says, eyes dark with fear.

“I know,” she tells him. “I forgive you for that too.”

**Author's Note:**

> This was prompted by my first forays into modern moral philosophy, borrowing particularly from Krista Thomason's work on forgiveness versus fairness & Kantian moral theory. Possibly (probably) more chapters to come as I work through more readings.


End file.
